Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) | Hansard source

First of all, I'd like to also acknowledge the member for Greenway, the Minister for Communications, for being here. It shows a professionalism that should be respected by so many others in the job they do. That's very encouraging. It's important because this is all part of our nation.

For me, one of the biggest fights I had was when I first arrived in parliament as a senator in 2005. It was the time of the sale of the remainder of the shares in Telstra. It was a big issue, and we had to, on behalf of those representing regional constituencies, try and bargain as best we could to get the best deal possible. I'll be frank. At the end, the whole range of the network guarantee, the customer service guarantee—all these things that we got, including $2 billion for things that we hadn't thought of at the time—was important, because we had to try and get regional people to a position. Basically, I held out my vote until we dealt with these things. At the start, we got nothing, then apparently they offered us $600 million. That came through, and then I was being pressured by my leader at the time to say yes. Then we got a billion dollars, and I still held out because I was in negotiations with other people telling me what funds we needed to actually do what we had to do. In the end, amongst all the guarantees we got, there was an extra $2 billion. I have to be frank; once we lost the election, my colleagues in the coalition voted with the Labor Party to get rid of the money. That was a huge disappointment, because it showed a lack of understanding of what exactly we were doing in regional areas.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to take you briefly to a conversation I just had in the other chamber. The member for Hotham and I had an exchange. I was saying how important it was to look after people in regional areas, especially with things such as roads, because we don't have bus services. Because we don't bus services, I said, 'A mother is unable to have a job because she spends the whole time trying to manage getting kids to school and back from school.' The interjection was: 'It's 2024. Don't you think guys should do it as well?' Yes, they could. But they've got to organise someone in the house to go out and have a job. Unfortunately, so often it's the reality that it falls on the mother to pick up this responsibility. It just does. What mothers want to do in regional areas is work from home; then they can have a job. But they can't work from home if they don't have any telecommunications or if it's unreliable. The employer just says: 'I'm sorry; it's unreliable. We can't do this. We can't have you as part of our office environment because we just can't rely on your internet connection.' Therefore, that person is relegated to home duties. They don't want to; they want to have a professional life like everybody else. I know this, with my wife being a journalist. She absolutely tunes me up about how things are going in telecommunications. I know there are quite a number of people on the other side probably thinking that's a very good reason not to give her telecommunications!

Let's go through some of the things that are important. I'd like to thank Elon Musk, because, before Elon Musk turned up with Starlink, having any satellite was really dodgy. They say 'go satellite'. Satellites just drop out. Things can happen in the house, like another kid turns on another program, and then your telecommunications drops out. This is just not viable. You'll probably note, colleagues, when I do mornings with Sunrise, that I've got this beautiful view. They say: 'Isn't that lovely? He's on the top of a hill.' There's a very good reason for that. It's the only place I get reception. That's why we go up the hill. We go up the hill to get reception. Sometimes we can get it from halfway up; sometimes we go to the top. We've got to have good reception for that link. Even that link's at 4G, not 5G.

One of our big worries about how we've gone from CDMA to 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G is that they're going to turn off 3G. For a lot of us, that's all we get. The No. 1 issue is that, if something goes wrong, you need to be able to make a phone call. We have 14 kilometres of dirt road—these are simple things. Just the other day, the road was out. A tree fell across it. No-one turns up with a chainsaw. Imagine if someone had a heart attack. Imagine if something had gone wrong and you can't get out. We're worried when they turn off 3G, Minister, that we're going to have 0G. We will have 5G come on board, but it's a much better service for a much smaller range. We've got to hold these people's feet to the fire and say: 'You don't turn off 3G till you can prove to the government that you've got 5G. We're going to go to areas that have got 3G, and, if they don't get 5G, we're going to say, "You can't turn off 3G until they've got a service."' They've got to have a service.

It is the No. 1 issue for our security and for anybody who's sick. If you're sick and you don't have a phone, you've got to move into town, and there are a whole range of other expenses. You've got to rent a house. You mightn't want to go into aged care, so you've got to rent a house. These things all come off telecommunications. We're finding this out lately. We're going higher and higher up the hill. As, apparently, the broadband gets better, we're going higher up the hill to try and get that connection. It's basic standard-of-living things.

If something goes wrong, you have to call the police. In the country, a lot of people own firearms, so, if something goes wrong, you have to call the police. If a problem arrives at the house, you can't drive out, because the problem is at your front door. You have to have that phone service to say, 'I have a problem here, and I need help in a big hurry.' If someone is home alone and has a stroke, a heart attack, appendicitis or something else go wrong, they need a phone service, otherwise they're in trouble. We do have instances, tragically, where people die because they can't call anybody. If you just work phone services on profitability, you will have areas that have a great standard of living and other areas that have poor people made poorer because they don't have any service at all. You need to hold their foot to the fire.

I want to give another example, Minister. A lot of these mobile phone towers are connected with electricity. You've just seen what happens when the electricity goes out. When it goes out, all your mobile phone towers go out. We had a meeting about this in a place called Nowendoc which almost filled the hall. These things are really important in local areas. They said: 'On our farms, if a pump goes out or if a house goes out, we have what's called a 'Murphy switch' on a generator. The generator kicks in straightaway and the power is restored. We understand that, at times, the power goes out. We rig things up so we can deal with it. For some unknown reason, mobile phone towers don't have that. We want someone to say to them, "We want you to give us assurity that, if the power goes out, the mobile phone tower keeps going." They trip and then you can have three or four go out, and then you have no mobile reception.' These people say: 'We will help you out, if you want. We can rig up the generator and make sure it's there. As soon as the power goes out, it will turn the switch and on it will go.' Sometimes you almost get a sense of belligerence. It gets put in the too-hard basket. They can't quite get there. They're not listening to these people and what they say. They need that tower going.

Minister, I understand the parochialism about mobile phone coverage, but it's really important that within your department you say: 'Get back to me. We need a basic service. I want you to tell me where on the map that basic service isn't.' That basic service might also be in the peri-urban areas of a major capital, where they just don't have mobile phone service. I've found that. We all know that when you drive along and go over a certain ridge there will be no phone service, and then you have it back later. Find out where those areas are and then say, 'Let's have a program to do this,' and hold them to the fire. Say, 'If you're going to get cash from the government, I want something back in return: your guarantee on exactly what you're going to do for us.'

Another thing is that they're very parochial—and I'm sure you understand—about roaming. They don't like roaming, because they like monopolies. There has to be a discussion that, even if it's not global, we need to have roaming in situ in certain areas of critical need. You can charge them a premium for using a tower, but you've got to allow them to use the tower. If someone goes from the city, they're on Optus and they roll their car where I live, Danglemah: forget it; there's no service. But if you go to other places, roll your car and you're on Telstra: no service. We have to say that in situ in certain areas, in critical areas, part of the deal is that you have to allow roaming. It's a safety thing. A telecommunications network that only works in Sydney isn't effective; it's effective when it works across the nation.

Work from home is something so many women want to do. That is the reality in regional areas. Once your kid goes to school, you are working at home or you're not working. For Zoom meetings, Teams meetings and all these types of meetings, they need the bandwidth to stay on that meeting, otherwise people don't take them seriously.

In our areas we have farm machinery. Farm machinery these days is completely different to the farm machinery of the past. It works with a 100 per cent connection to places like Detroit. If you're on a John Deere, your tractor is talking to Detroit. Why? If you have a bearing or heat issue or something else going wrong, you have to turn the engine off straightaway, because otherwise the problem goes from a $3,000 problem to a $50,000 problem. The message comes back to you to switch it off—obviously it's not a person ringing you; you get a message to immediately turn it off. That's how farming works now, that's the level it's at. For it to be at that level, you need the telecommunications capacity for you to buy that infrastructure from Detroit—and soon it will be from India and all over the place—because that's how it works these days. You've got to be able to do that.

Also, for us—I live in the hills—there's occupational health and safety. If people go out, they've got to be contactable if something goes wrong. If they come off a horse; if they're working with machinery and something goes wrong; or if they roll a car, a tractor or a truck, we've got to know that something has gone wrong. If they haven't got telecommunications, that is a big problem. Rather than saying, 'We just can't do it,' we've got to think around the corners. How can we deliver this to that area? We have microcells, and that's worked with microcells. The big mobile phone towers can be hellishly expensive, but you can get microcells that at least partly deal with the issue in certain areas. I'm thinking of Upper Horton. I'm thinking of out the back of Scone and at Moonan Flat. We've got microcells in these areas, so at least the people in the village, including elderly people, have got the capacity and the security.

Other things are coming our way. Artificial intelligence is coming our way, and this is going to absolutely exponentially change the relevance of telecommunications. It's going to go through the roof. Therefore, it's going to exponentially change the disconnection of people who can't be on board with it. If you don't have a connection with it, you're going to be light years away.

We've also got to acknowledge, with artificial intelligence coming forward, that a lot of people today have clerical jobs, and, just like factories knocked out weavers, this will knock out clerical jobs; they'll go. A computer will be able to do it better than you, and it will be vastly cheaper. So we're going to need a telecommunications system to get these people who will be out of work back into work. You're going to see some massive changes. Here's a classic one, tangential to this: why do we need office blocks if we don't have office workers in them? I'm an accountant. You're starting to get impairments on those assets right now. People are starting to ask the question, 'Why do we need that—because these people will have to find a different job.' We can be Luddites and think, 'We'll just smash the telecommunications system; we'll smash AI,' but you won't.

So we've got to have a telecommunications system that reaches over and says: 'This is coming our way; how do we make sure these people are still employed? How do they work?' What are their jobs in this new era of artificial intelligence? What is artificial intelligence going to do? What are the jobs that our kids and grandkids—and you—are going to do when this event arises? And it's arriving right now. So I thank you very much for that.

The final thing I think we need to check in on is adversaries, especially countries. We know that people are hacking into our systems. They could create such disruption—like the communist People's Republic of China, the Iranians and the Russians. If they take down our system, if we don't have proper security there, they can have half the battle won before they do anything else. The first event in a conflict will not be you hearing bombs dropping out of the sky; it'll be in the cyber world, all of a sudden. The only thing that's going to drop out is your telecommunications system, taking out the banking system, taking out everything with it, creating absolute chaos on the ground before you can do anything.

So we have to make sure our telecommunications system is bulletproof against that. Unless you've got the investment—I know we invested $10 billion and you're investing in it. We're all doing it because, on national security, there should be very little differentiation between parties. We'll all go down the same toilet if it comes unstuck. I ask you to make sure we have a strong line of sight there. Go to the National Security Committee and insist that they prove to you that they've got it all under control.

See this speech in context